Russian Roulette

By MARK ATWOOD LAWRENCE

Published: December 17, 2006

KHRUSHCHEV'S COLD WAR

The Inside Story of an American Adversary.

By Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali.

Illustrated. 670 pp.

W. W. Norton & Company. $35.

NEARLY five years after becoming the United States ambassador to Moscow in 1957, Llewellyn Thompson had made little headway in penetrating the mysteries of decision-making inside the Kremlin. ''It is frustrating not to know what is really going on,'' he lamented in 1962 amid escalating cold war tensions. ''It's like dealing with a bunch of bootleggers and gangsters.''

Thompson was not alone in his exasperation. American leaders throughout the cold war struggled mightily -- and usually unsuccessfully -- to understand what made their rivals tick. And for many years historians, working with the benefit of hindsight, did little better. Only recently have answers started to emerge, thanks to the partial opening of Soviet records.

With their deeply researched ''Khrushchev's Cold War,'' Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali lift the veil of secrecy further than ever, exposing how Moscow made foreign policy decisions during Nikita Khrushchev's tempestuous reign as leader of the Soviet Union from 1955 to 1964. The book is indispensable for anyone hoping to understand the cold war's most dangerous phase, and how the world managed to survive it.

Fursenko, a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow, and Naftali, the newly appointed director of the Nixon presidential library in Yorba Linda, Calif., covered some of this ground in a 1997 book on the Cuban missile crisis, one of the first studies to make extensive use of Soviet records. This time, they draw on a much larger trove of Kremlin material declassified in 2003, notably the records of the Presidium of the Central Committee, the key decision-making body during the Khrushchev era.

These documents shed new light on one of the cold war's most puzzling questions: Why would Khrushchev, the leader who denounced Stalin's barbarism, spoke of ''peaceful coexistence'' with the West and delighted in bathroom humor, be willing to risk nuclear Armageddon by repeatedly trying to oust the United States from West Berlin and, most menacing of all, installing nuclear weapons in Cuba? How could he simultaneously be, as Richard Nixon once said, ''a man of great warmth and totally belligerent''?

Rejecting those who have dismissed Khrushchev as a reckless buffoon, Fursenko and Naftali see logic in his erratic behavior. They contend that the Soviet leader wanted to ease tensions and to focus on raising his country's abysmal standard of living. ''Khrushchev,'' they write, ''imagined a grand settlement with the United States that would demilitarize the cold war, allowing him to redirect resources to the Soviet civilian economy and restrict the East-West struggle to the ideological and economic level, where he was convinced history would ultimately prove him right.''

What changed repeatedly, Fursenko and Naftali say, was Khrushchev's strategy for attaining such a settlement. Sometimes he tried to seduce Washington with gentle words and offers to negotiate, the likes of which would not be heard again until Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the 1980s. At other times he sought to scare the United States to deter it from exploiting its considerable advantages, and ultimately to force concessions at the bargaining table.

The decision to place nuclear arms in Cuba provides the quintessential example of the latter approach. Fursenko and Naftali emphasize that Khrushchev had no desire for war. Rather, by positioning missiles so close to the United States, he hoped to offset a huge American advantage in nuclear weaponry and to intimidate Kennedy into negotiating with Moscow as an equal. It seemed a quick, cheap way to gain American respect, which Khrushchev desperately craved. Even after backing down, Khrushchev found solace in the fact that Washington had taken him seriously, vowing not to invade Cuba in exchange for a Soviet promise to withdraw the missiles. ''We are members of the World Club,'' he boasted before his Presidium colleagues.

Perhaps he was right. But Fursenko and Naftali shrewdly point out that any success Khrushchev may have had came at an enormous cost. His risk-taking not only put the world through hair-raising crises but also played straight into the hands of American hawks, who demanded a major arms buildup and denounced any politician who dared advocate a relaxation of tensions.

Still, Fursenko and Naftali never really say whether the Americans, if they had recognized Khrushchev's basic interest in peace, might have been able to strike a deal to end the cold war -- or at least ease it drastically. The authors sometimes criticize American policy makers for failing to recognize Khrushchev's basic desire for coexistence. At other points, they blame the Soviet leader himself for obscuring his basic desires in a cloud of unnecessary posturing.

But Fursenko and Naftali are certain of one thing: the failure to achieve a breakthrough during Khrushchev's rule meant the cold war would continue for a long time. Khrushchev's unimaginative successors had none of his interest in an overall settlement. Only Gorbachev's emergence would bring Khrushchev's boldness, stripped of its brinkmanship, back into play.